On Ernst Jünger’s ‘Total Mobilization’- A Re-evaluation in the Era of the War on Terrorism...

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John Armitage War on Terrorism

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On Ernst Jünger’s ‘Total Mobilization’:A Re-evaluation in the Era of the Waron Terrorism

JOHN ARMITAGE

Introduction: About Ernst Jünger

Ernst Jünger is an intriguing figure in twentieth century German literature andsocial theory. He was born in Heidelberg in 1895, into a middle class family ofpharmacists and chemists. Jünger’s childhood and maturity are recounted in partin his autobiographical journals Siebzig Verweht (Seventy Wanes)(1980–1995).Jünger spent his adolescence in Hanover, where he attended boarding school, andhis adulthood, when not on his frequent and extensive trips abroad, chiefly inBerlin and, finally, Wilflingen. The phenomenology of World War I is a majortopic of Jünger’s literary output and social theory. Indeed, as the following extractfrom Jünger’s Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (War as Inner Experience) (1922)(quoted in Wolin, 1993: 119–20) shows, for him, taking up a writing careerinitially entailed a direct confrontation with the delirious effects of both trenchwarfare and military technology:

[War] is an intoxication beyond all intoxication, an unleashing that breaks all bonds. It is afrenzy without caution and limits, comparable only to the forces of nature. There the individual

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is like a raging storm, the tossing sea, and the roaring thunder. He has melted into everything.He rests at the dark door of death like a bullet that has reached its goal. And the purple wavesdash over him. For a long time he has no awareness of transition. It is as if a wave slipped backinto the flowing sea.

Jünger received the supreme German medal, the Pour Le Mérite, fighting on theFrench Front during World War I and later won numerous literary prizes, includ-ing the Goethe Prize in 1982 and the ‘Tever’ Literature Prize in 1987. His firstbook, The Storm of Steel (1929a), is on his Fronterlebnis (‘front experience’) ofWorld War I, an event that was to remain significant in Jünger’s subsequentwritings on aesthetics, war and mobilization. In Berlin, Carl Schmitt, one of theforemost conservative German political theorists, deeply influenced Jünger(Neaman, 1999: 31). Following the publication of his autobiographical Das aben-teuerliche Herz (The Adventurous Heart) (1929b), Jünger was increasingly, andnotoriously, associated with the intellectual environment and the peripheries ofNazi Party politics (Bullock, 1992: 60). In 1933, subsequent to the publication ofhis 1930 essay on ‘Total Mobilization’ (hereafter Jünger, 1993a: 119–39) and DerArbeiter (The Worker) (1932), both socio-political and theoretical texts, Jüngerrefused to join either the Nazi Party or the Nazi-led German Academy ofWriters, and left Berlin for the town of Goslar. During the late 1930s Jüngerwrote an adventure story, African Diversions (1954), before moving to Überlin-gen and then to Kirchhorst, where he completed his anti-Nazi novel, On theMarble Cliffs (1947). Elevated to the rank of captain during the Germancampaign in France during World War II, Jünger was appointed to the Parisgeneral staff, where, between 1941–1944, he continued writing his autobio-graphical journals whilst conducting research for his anti-Nazi volume entitledThe Peace (1948). In 1945, following Germany’s surrender to the Allies, anddespite his rejection of Nazism, Jünger encountered the antagonism of those whocharged him with being one of its forerunners before setting up house in Wilflin-gen in 1950. From the 1960s to the 1990s Jünger produced several novels, includ-ing The Glass Bees (1960a), Aladdin’s Problem (1992) Eumeswil (1993b) and ADangerous Encounter (1993c). In addition he published political works such asDer Weldtstaat (The World State) (1960b), an entomological study, SubtileJagden (Subtle Hunts) (1967) and a volume on the process of writing, Autor undAutorschaft (Author and Authorship) (1984). In 1984, and somewhat controver-sially, Jünger participated in the tributes paid to the victims of both World Warsat Verdun, France, together with the then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl andFrench President François Mitterand. A number of recent books on Jünger havebeen produced, inclusive of Nevin’s (1997) sympathetic Ernst Jünger andGermany and Neaman’s (1999) critical A Dubious Past. As an active and

192 � Body and Society Vol. 9 No. 4




internationally renowned yet reclusive conservative thinker, it was inevitable thatJünger would choose to receive Chancellor Kohl and President Mitterand at hishome in Wilflingen in 1993, approximately five years before his death, whichtook place six weeks prior to his 103rd birthday on 17 February 1998.

Evidently, Jünger made several valuable if controversial contributions toGerman literature and social theory. My contention in this article is that Jünger’sNietzschean and nihilistic inflected texts on the intoxicating experience of WorldWar I and the energies it unleashed ought not to blind contemporary criticalsocial theorists to the significance of Jünger’s (1993a: 119–39) conceptions of‘Total Mobilization’ and what I shall call ‘the totally mobilized human body’(henceforward, ‘the totally mobilized body’). This article consequently focusesmainly on Jünger’s socio-political and theoretical text ‘Total Mobilization’ andthe functioning of societies and bodies that have understood the significance ofmodern warfare. ‘Total Mobilization’ is also one of the essays by means of whichJünger’s heroic, nationalist, conservative revolutionary and seemingly endlesslydebatable anti-Nazi status was initially instigated and subsequently severelycensured by critical theorists and historians with comparable interests such asWalter Benjamin (1999) and Jeffrey Herf (1984). Yet I argue that, today, Jünger’spowerful and constantly thought-provoking hypotheses concerning totalmobilization are worthy of careful reconsideration. Accordingly, I present acontemporary interpretation and application of a number of Jünger’s ideas.However, I do so within the present-day context of what Gilles Deleuze (1995:177–82) described as ‘control societies’, the United States’ (US) led ‘War onTerrorism’ and the political ascendancy in the US of what I label ‘the neocon-servative human body’ (henceforth, ‘the neoconservative body’). I propose that,if Jünger’s ‘Total Mobilization’ symbolizes an extraordinary prefiguration oftotalitarian rule and the totally mobilized body, then the advent of controlsocieties and the War on Terrorism, as key features of a kind of excessive or‘hypermodern total mobilization’, signify not only a remarkable continuationand intensification of total mobilization by other means but also a prefigurationof ‘globalitarian rule’ and the neoconservative body. Hence, in the conclusion,and by way of a variety of illustrations, I sketch an alternative model of ‘egali-tarian rule’ and the ‘neoegalitarian body’.

‘Total Mobilization’ and the Totally Mobilized Body

Jünger’s ‘Total Mobilization’, which first appeared in Jünger’s edited 1930 anthol-ogy, Krieg und Krieger (War and Warrior), has at least two main elements, onlythe first of which was fully developed by him. Firstly, the essay makes a most

On Ernst Jünger’s ‘Total Mobilization’ � 193




important contribution to the prefiguration of totalitarian societies. The majorimport of ‘Total Mobilization’, though, is as a study of the relationship betweensociety, war and technology, even if the essay was met with a generally criticalreaction both from traditional conservatives and left-wing critics alike. However,‘Total Mobilization’ has nonetheless played a crucial role in historical, social andpolitical debates over war and technology, German conservatism, national revol-ution and Nazism (Neaman, 1999: 41; Wolin, 1993: 120). Secondly, and whileJünger never explicitly developed the concept of the totally mobilized body, Ipropose that ‘Total Mobilization’ makes a key contribution to the understand-ing of the operation of bodies that have recognized the importance of warfare.The chief significance of this aspect of Jünger’s essay is its examination of thelinks between the body, war and technology. As noted, Jünger’s literary worksand social theory have caused a great deal of controversy. Yet, to my knowledge,the debate over Jünger’s beliefs about the totally mobilized body is non-existent.Possibly this is because both Jünger’s spoken proclamations and his writingshabitually convey a simultaneously alluring and repellent detachment from theactivities of society and the body. I will briefly discuss the social aspects ofJünger’s ‘Total Mobilization’ prior to introducing and developing an explanationof his perspective on the totally mobilized body.

Total MobilizationReplete with important discussions of war, Jünger’s ‘Total Mobilization’ waspartly inspired by the military writings of the young General de Gaulle on totalwarfare and controversially employed by the Nazis as a rallying call (Hervier,1995: 21; Neaman, 1999: 41). It was in addition roundly condemned by Marxistintellectuals such as Benjamin (Benjamin, 1999: 318; Leslie, 2000: 26–9; Wolin,1993: 122) and deeply influenced the political writings and seminars of thephenomenologist Heidegger (Hervier, 1995: 55; Wolin, 1993: 121; Zimmerman,1990).

‘Total Mobilization’ concentrates on Jünger’s assertion that, for Germany,World War I was a disaster. Moreover, Jünger (1993a: 123) contended that theWar was an environment in which the visceral battle for existence over extinc-tion literally blows every other historical and social concern apart. Consequently,for Jünger (1993a: 123), the significance of World War I was the realization that,perhaps for the first time, ‘the genius of war was penetrated by the spirit ofprogress’. Such recognition therefore shattered any remaining convictions thatthe development of either science or technology would lead to a time of peace.For Jünger (1993a: 125), however, the unique characteristic of the post World WarI period was the course of action involving the total mobilization of the state’s





military and social resources. In fact, in Jünger’s (1993a: 125) terms, total mobiliz-ation firstly caused the end of nineteenth century limited war and what might betermed ‘partial mobilization’, that is, of rigid demarcations between civilianiza-tion and militarization, and secondly brought about the downfall of the oldEuropean monarchies. The age of partial mobilization and monarchy had, ofcourse, in part, not only rejected progress but also limited the use of technologyin war (Jünger, 1993a: 125).

Jünger also suggested that the importance of World War I was that it hadcompletely transformed society into an animated mass of energy and war into adynamic production site where new kinds of militarized institutions, of trans-portation, of logistics and weaponry advanced together with the armed forces.As Jünger (1993a: 126–7) put it:

In this unlimited marshaling of potential energies, which transforms the warring countries intovolcanic forges, we perhaps find the most striking sign of the dawn of the age of labor . . . Itmakes the World War a historical event superior in significance to the French Revolution. Inorder to deploy energies of such proportion, fitting one’s sword-arm no longer suffices; forthis is a mobilization . . . that requires extension to the deepest marrow, life’s finest nerve. Itsrealization is the task of total mobilization: an act which, as if through a single grasp of thecontrol panel, conveys the extensively branched and densely veined power supply of modernlife towards the great current of martial energy.

Moreover, although Jünger (1993a: 127) thought that total mobilization was aphenomenon of World War I, he also considered that ‘its fullest possibilities havenot yet been reached’. Indeed, he considered that it would become a universalsocio-political phenomenon, inclusive of state directed mobilization in countriesas different as Russia and Italy, Germany, France and the US. To be sure, inembracing this development, Jünger (1993a: 127) wrote that, by means of totalmobilization, various global flows and frantic forces were mysteriously unitingto produce a new society touched by what he later labeled the ‘factor of order’(Hervier, 1995: 69). Yet the totally mobilized society was founded not only onorder, technology and incessant production but also on a novel political economyof war and peace allied to a national ‘readiness’ for technological and militarymobilization (Jünger, 1993a: 129; original emphasis). Additionally, it was thisreadiness, this ‘special quality of “uselessness” ’, which attracted Jünger (1993a:129) to the concept of total mobilization. In Jünger’s (1993: 129) words:

Whenever we confront efforts of such proportions, possessing the special quality of ‘useless-ness’ [‘Zwecklosigkeit’] – say the erection of mighty constructions like pyramids and cathe-drals, or wars that call into play the ultimate mainsprings of life – economic explanations, nomatter how illuminating, are not sufficient. This is the reason that the school of historicalmaterialism can only touch the surface of the process. To explain efforts of this sort, we oughtrather focus our first suspicions on phenomena of a cultic variety.





Not surprisingly, Benjamin (1999: 314) severely criticized Jünger’s newlyaestheticized ‘theory of war’ and ‘uselessness’ as ‘nothing other than an unin-hibited translation of l’art pour l’art to war itself’.

All the same, what Jünger (1993a: 130–1) was suggesting was that totalmobilization was a twentieth century method of eliminating nineteenth centuryeconomic and technological partial mobilization, the principal reason why,according to Jünger, Germany had been defeated in World War I. Consequently,and in contrast to traditional German conservative critics of the Enlightenment,Jünger, the conservative revolutionary, advocated the eradication of the obstaclesto total mobilization and the injection of what might be termed ‘the spirit ofindustrialism’ into German nationalism as preparation for any subsequentEuropean war (Wolin, 1993: 120). In concluding, Jünger proposed that, if put intopractice, his policy of total mobilization would free Germany, and other indus-trializing societies, of partial mobilization and their anti-industrial standpoint bymodernizing traditional human values using the language of force and substitut-ing conventional industrial apathy with modern technological developments.

The Totally Mobilized BodyOn top of the social features of total mobilization, Jünger’s ‘Total Mobilization’is in addition alive with valuable deliberations on warriors, workers andmonarchs. ‘Total Mobilization’ was therefore to some extent motivated by animplicit conception of the totally mobilized body. The totally mobilized body isalso an idea that, as with total mobilization, was denounced by Benjamin (1999:313–14).

In conceiving of the totally mobilized body, Jünger (1993a: 123) observed thatwhilst World War I had indeed been a tragedy for the German people it had beena ‘gripping spectacle’. Additionally, Jünger depicted the War as a Darwinianstruggle for survival, arguing that its historical importance for the body was that,from now on, the militarized body, as opposed to the civilianized body, wouldsymbolize the spirit of modernity. Discarding any lingering rational beliefs inscience and technology or the future of the civilianized body, Jünger (1993a: 124)went on to maintain that the actual importance of progress was ‘of a moremysterious and different sort: one which uses the apparently undisguised maskof reason as a superb place of hiding’. For one thing, in the aftermath of WorldWar I, not only the total mobilization of the technological and social resourcesof the state but also the total mobilization of the corporeal resources of the statewas required. For another, the advent of the totally mobilized body broughtabout the downfall of what could be called ‘the partially mobilized body’ or abody that sought to hold fast to the distinctions between the civilianized body





and the militarized body. Just as importantly, the arrival of the totally mobilizedbody set off the demise of the monarchical body. In other words, the passing ofboth the partially mobilized body and the monarchical body in the early twen-tieth century paved the way for the unconstrained application of technological‘progress’ in warfare.

Jünger’s (1993a: 126) examination of the significance of World War I for thebody pointed to its imminent conversion into a kind of force field, to its involve-ment in the militarization of the labor process and to its ongoing transformationfrom a civilianized body into a militarized body. Or, as Bullock (1992: 118) writesin his discussion of Jünger’s ‘Total Mobilization’: the ‘vital focus’ of this kind ofmilitarized way of life is somehow ‘lifted from the individual’ and given over tothe ‘collective force’ of the state as the ‘cycle of technological production anddestruction is made the end and justification of all the human energies whose sumit is’. Indeed, for Bullock (1992: 118), total mobilization is a ‘dynamic’ that surgesthrough the individual body, ‘but before which the uniqueness of any particu-larity in him is entirely indifferent’. Consequently, it is reasonable to suggest thatJünger’s conception of soldier and workers can be equated with a new social‘type’ involving the total mobilization of human vitality and its active diffusionthroughout modern society (Wolin, 1993: 122).

Yet, for Jünger (1993a: 127), the totally mobilized body was not merely set todevelop into a worldwide socio-political experience but also into one that wouldbe required to give up its ‘individual liberty’ to the needs of total mobilization.Jünger (1993a: 128) accordingly thought that the totally mobilized body wouldinaugurate a new way of life rooted in discipline, in which, with a ‘pleasure-tinged horror’, he sensed that, here, ‘not a single atom is not in motion’. Jünger’spolitical economy of the totally mobilized body was then concerned with theinteraction between the militarized body and the civilianized body, with thefortunes of the body in the age of the nation-state and socialized technology, andwith the mass and individual bodies of workers, warriors and monarchs. In short,what Jünger presented was a political view of the body that centered on osten-sibly deep-seated social developments.

Likewise, Jünger’s somewhat detached observations on the human sufferingproduced by the War were frequently combined with an irrational vitalism thatdelighted in the idea of total mobilization and planning (Hervier, 1995: 69). AsHerf (1984: 94–5) remarks on this aspect of Jünger’s ‘Total Mobilization’:‘Although the pain and suffering the body must endure in modern warfare arousehorror, the national readiness for mobilization touches a “life nerve” that takespleasure in the “purposelessness” of a process that has a “cultic nature” ’.Benjamin (1968: 241–2) also knowingly characterized Jünger’s desolate hedonism





precisely when commenting on fascism’s ‘dreamt-of metalization of the humanbody’ and the Futurist Marinetti who, like Jünger, he said:

expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed bytechnology . . . Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for theOlympian Gods now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it canexperience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

In sum, Jünger’s implicit notion of the totally mobilized body was preoccupiedwith the objective of disposing of the partially mobilized body. The totallymobilized body was as a result a body that welcomed modernity in the guise ofa synthesis of nationalism and industrialism. Determined to bring to fruition itswill to power, its spirited insights into the technological and cultural values ofmodern warfare, the totally mobilized body thus ultimately aimed to achieve thetriumph of the spirit over technology.

Debating Jünger

Having sketched the main characteristics of Jünger’s arguments involving totalmobilization and the totally mobilized body, I shall now specify a number ofcriticisms of his viewpoint in ‘Total Mobilization’. Naturally, given his extremeright-wing standpoint described above, more recent commentators thanBenjamin have critically assessed Jünger’s hypotheses concerning total mobiliz-ation and the totally mobilized body. Herf (1984: 92), for example, has arguedthat Jünger’s treatise on total mobilization deserves critical scrutiny as ‘it was thisessay that first led Walter Benjamin to write about the aestheticization of politicsamong the intellectuals of the Right’. However, Herf has also directed a numberof explicit criticisms at Jünger’s ‘Total Mobilization’. First of all, and beginningwith a methodological approach drawn from the Frankfurt School of criticaltheory but ending with one taken from liberalism (Eley, 1987: 187–97), Herf’s(1984: 94) analysis maintains that Jünger supported the ‘worldwide trend towardstate-directed mobilization’ whilst making no ‘specific economic and politicalproposals concerning the relation between state and economy’. Secondly, Herf(1984: 94) suggests that Jünger ‘radically separated technology from society,making it instead “the expression” of a “mysterious and compelling claim” ’ whileleaving fundamental if dreary empirical questions concerning the appearance,progression and expansion of total mobilization aside. Lastly, argues Herf (1984:94), there is a ‘sadomasochistic, spectatorial aspect to all of Jünger’s strangebroodings on the war’. In Jünger’s ‘Total Mobilization’, for instance, disclosesHerf (1984: 94–5), existential sorrow and joy are indivisible, as when Jüngerwholly recognizes the anguish the totally mobilized body must bear in modern





warfare whilst simultaneously extolling the delights of senseless production,meaningless destruction and the unleashing of permanent war.

There can be little doubt that Jünger, similar to the Nazis and Heidegger(Wolin, 1993: 121), was engaged in the early 1930s with exploring the potentialof and championing the international propensity towards total mobilization andthe totally mobilized body. Yet, and against Herf, I want to argue that Jünger wasnot a failed or impractical political economist lacking any concern with concretepolicies. Instead, I submit that Jünger, like Heidegger, was a right-wing intellec-tual, cultural and social theorist, mesmerized by the history, aesthetics, philoso-phies and technologies of modernization. Jünger’s writings and style, forexample, are, as Struve (1973: 377–414) has demonstrated, critical rather thanpolicy oriented. Furthermore, while Kater (1981: 263–77) has documented how,after 1933, Germany’s impasse was such that there was no system of policymaking, Herwig (1988: 80–115) has persuasively argued that Germany alsolacked the intellectual and techno-industrial capital to equal that of the Allies,making Jünger’s plans for total mobilization unattainable.

Needless to say, Jünger did to a great extent dissociate modern technologyfrom society when attempting to explain technology’s manifestation as amysterious and compelling claim that exposed the modern body to an existencelived in the alienated age of mass society. Still, this does not automatically meanthat Jünger’s descriptive account of the technological, social and corporealconditions of total mobilization has no theoretical importance. As Stern (1953:11) put it, total mobilization was Jünger’s ‘most distinct intellectual achievement’since Jünger had understood that:

what nature meant to earlier ages, machines mean to ours. Technical perfection is not progressbut an elementary fact. Any scale of values which disregards it, or fails to account for it posi-tively, is as decadent and false as any earlier system would have been had it rejected nature.(Stern, 1953: 43–4)

What is more, as Herf (1984: 70) himself observes, the main basis for Jünger’smotivation was his Fronterlebnis of World War I. From this viewpoint, then, itappears reasonable to regard Jünger’s effort to square his reactionary politics withthe progress of modern technology as an original war-strewn insight into theplace of the masses in a world made both nihilistic and profoundly ambivalentby machines (Kahler, 1956: 567–602; Woods, 1990: 72–91). Likewise, Jünger’sdisdain for routine practical issues relating to the execution of total mobilizationcan be judged as the result of his concern with describing intense human experi-ence rather than with matter-of-fact or theoretically informed questions concern-ing policy making.

Lastly, as Herf maintains, it is true that, on occasion, Jünger’s stance appears





to be that of a sadomasochistic eyewitness on technology and an atypicalcommentator on World War I. Yet none of Herf’s criticisms in this regard candiminish the fact that Jünger’s prefigurative portrayals of technology and war aregenerally seen to be a vividly correct acknowledgement of the human, almostsexual, attraction to control and violence (see, e.g., Stern, 1953). Besides, Jüngersaw his spectatorial viewpoint on technology in particular as being concernedwith, amongst other things, the humiliation and alienation of the individuallaborer, as later described in his Der Arbeiter (The Worker) (1932). In fact,Jünger’s unease about modern technology and the fate of the laborer also decis-ively influenced the Frankfurt School and Marxist theorist Marcuse’s (1964) OneDimensional Man (Orr, 1974: 312–36). However, as a writer on World War I andits aftermath, there is no question that Jünger’s style and texts are at variance withmore or less every other comparable author. Moving elegantly from unreal yetuncannily accurate depictions of technology to sometimes terrifyingly incom-prehensible scenes of workers, warriors and monarchs, Jünger’s fragmentaryanalyses rarely add up to anything that could ever be described as a programexcept perhaps as one that works against the materialism of modernity(Hochhuth, 1988: 347–68; Bullock, 1992: 79).

Jünger’s conceptions of total mobilization and the totally mobilized body arethus concerned with the development of a metaphorical, almost experimental,depiction of the war machine and its transformation of human experience(Bullock, 1992: 79). They are then more exactly a brilliantly accurate appreciationof our partially erotic yet politicized fascination with violence and rather less, asHerf argues, a sadomasochistic, spectatorial and strange meditation on warfare.Total mobilization and the totally mobilized body in this sense are productive ifprovocative ideas. But as Bullock (1992: 79) suggests, such provocations ‘shouldnot close off our questioning to their other possibilities’. They are also notionsthat I argue are not only due for cautious re-examination but can also be devel-oped to offer a perspective on the wide-ranging anxieties regarding advancedtechnology and what Bullock (1992: 79) describes as ‘the experience of vacancy,of desolation in a world where the continuities that bind a community have beenplunged into night and fog’. For total mobilization and the totally mobilizedbody can be employed as resources and incorporated into a technique of writingthat makes use of new kinds of terminology, style and texts centered on Fron-terlebnis. Aspiring to exploit assets and techniques that were unlike those of otherwriters, Jünger’s descriptions of total mobilization and the totally mobilizedbody advance gracefully from dreamlike to nightmarish but mysteriously preciserepresentations of workers, warriors and monarchs. Distinct from the charac-terization of mobilization and total mobilization as constituents of military





tradition, therefore, Jünger’s model of total mobilization and the totally mobil-ized body are components of a German literary custom focused on Nietzschean-like aphorisms and a somewhat anarchic method of investigation. It follows thatJünger’s theorization of total mobilization and the totally mobilized body corre-sponds to any number of social regimes and modern bodies and especially to theunderstanding of the social consequences of warfare. In analyzing the predica-ment of workers, warriors and monarchs, Jünger wanted to escape from thefetters of the programmatic. He wanted to discover and then produce and activatean examination of war that, albeit extremely controversially, operated againstboth the Nazi regime, which he distanced himself from and quickly came todetest (Bullock, 1992: 79; Hervier, 1995: 71), and the materialist predisposition ofthe era.

Re-evaluating Jünger’s ‘Total Mobilization’ in the Era of the War on Terrorism

The intellectual history of Jünger’s conception of ‘Total Mobilization’ and thetotally mobilized body is primarily the saga of countless and essentially irre-solvable socio-political and corporeal debates, critiques and counter-critiques.Yet, in this section, I shall elucidate and employ several of Jünger’s insights todetermine a range of themes whose contemporary realization I believe seeks totransform if not exceed the confines of Jünger’s account of ‘Total Mobilization’and the totally mobilized body. My ‘Deleuzian’ reading of control societies, theUS’ War on Terrorism and the political pre-eminence in the US of the neo-conservative body is therefore emphatically not intended to offer a simple reit-eration and application of Jünger’s conception of ‘Total Mobilization’, totalitarianrule and the totally mobilized body. Rather, through a Deleuzian analysis ofcontrol societies and the War on Terrorism as hypermodern total mobilization,my aim is to map out a trajectory that shows Jünger’s investigation into moderntotal mobilization as prophetic both for his immediate moment and for my ownexamination of contemporary history. Hence my argument below is not that theWar on Terrorism denotes a rupture of the present period but, more accurately,a hypermodern intensification of the militarized and technologized social logicsof modernity. In what follows, then, I present an outline of the trajectory andmechanics of contemporary capitalism and marketing, individualization, infor-mationalism, globalitarian rule and the neoconservative body with the object ofhypermodernizing, intensifying and adapting aspects of Jünger’s study of totalmobilization.





The War on TerrorismUS President George W. Bush’s War on Terrorism is motivated by the events ofSeptember 11th 2001 in which terrorists, using hijacked airliners, destroyed thetwin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City as well as attackingthe Pentagon Building in Washington D.C. (Kellner, 2003). Contentiously madeuse of by the Bush administration as ‘a call to arms at the End of History’(Graham et al., forthcoming), the US led War on Terrorism has been exposed tointense critique by postmodern sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman (2002:87–117). However, it has also extended the impact of the works of conservativepolitical scientists like Samuel Huntington (Huntington, 1956, 1996; Kellner,2002: 148).

For Bush (2001a: 1), the events of September 11th were a ‘national tragedy’for the US that heralded a completely new situation in which Americans areasked to wage a War on Terrorism. Furthermore, it is a War that entails direct-ing ‘every resource at our command – every means of diplomacy, every tool ofintelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, andevery necessary weapon of war’ (Bush, 2001b: 3). Accordingly, for the Bushregime, the meaning of September 11th is the appreciation that, today, terrorists,the forces of ‘Evil’, have infiltrated ‘the progress of Good’ (Baudrillard, 2002: 13).This awareness has also tempered those pre-September 11th and overconfidentbeliefs that the advancement of technoscience and Information and Communi-cations Technologies (ICTs) such as the Internet, suspected by the Bush adminis-tration to have been used by the September 11th terrorists for planning purposes,might bring peace to regions like the Middle East (see, e.g., Siegel, 2000). Never-theless, for Bush (2001c: 1), what defined ‘the spirit and courage of America’ inthe aftermath of September 11th was the mobilization of over 35,000 troops ofthe Ready Reserve Units of the US Armed Forces and the Coast Guard to activeduty as a ‘strong symbol’ of the US’ steadfastness in a time of national emer-gency. Moreover, from the perspective of the current US government, the Waron Terrorism is the driving force behind what might be called the death rattle ofthe twentieth century Cold War between the US and the former Soviet Union.For example, following September 11th, said Bush recently, ‘the doctrine ofcontainment’, the post World War II policy of the US toward the ex-SovietUnion that advocated accommodation rather than war, ‘just doesn’t hold anywater as far as I am concerned’ (Purdum, 2003: 3). The War on Terrorism is thena strategy of US expansion and an approach to what Bush terms the ‘axis of evil’(North Korea, Iran and Iraq) that implies the promotion of war more willinglythan accommodation (Bush, 2002: 2). Thus, for the Bush regime, the post-September 11th era has nothing to do with questions of containment or with the





former Soviet Union or even with accommodation. Rather, it has everything todo with issues of US expansion, with the axis of evil, with the embrace of war asthe ‘progress of Good’ and with the uninhibited deployment of weaponry in thename of the War on Terrorism.

A further noteworthy development within the current post-September 11thenvironment of the US is the acceptance of what Bush (2002: 5) has described as‘a new ethic and a new creed: “Let’s roll” ’. The War on Terrorism can as a resultbe portrayed as a sort of factory producing hypermodern militarized organiz-ations. Bush’s recent launch of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS,2001: 1), headed by Governor Tom Ridge, for instance, has as its mission thedevelopment and synchronization of the ‘implementation of a comprehensivenational strategy to secure the US from terrorist threats or attacks’. The Depart-ment therefore ‘coordinates the executive branch’s efforts to detect, prepare for,prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from terrorist attacks within theUS’ alongside, and amid myriad other state institutions, its military, justice,health, transport and intelligence agencies (DHS, 2001: 4). As a consequence,Bush’s (2002: 5) ‘new culture of responsibility’ or what might be called the ‘let’sroll culture of responsibility’, is converting the War on Terrorism in the US intoan information factory. Certainly, it is within militarized institutions such as theDepartment of Homeland Security that Hardt and Negri (2000: 290; originalemphasis) sense the emergence of the era of ‘immaterial labor – that is, labor thatproduces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge,or communication’. The catastrophe of September 11th was then one of the mostextraordinary and important incidents for Americans since the fall of the BerlinWall. This is because, to facilitate the introduction of Bush’s let’s roll culture ofresponsibility, conventional civilian strategies of national security have beensupplemented by preparations for the War on Terrorism which necessitate acomprehensively detailed focus on ‘bioterrorism, emergency response, airportand border security, and improved intelligence’ (Bush, 2002: 3). An importantgoal for the War on Terrorism within the US is thus the bringing to fruition ofa pervasive and deep-rooted let’s roll culture of responsibility.

Of course, for Bush, whilst the War on Terrorism was set in motion by theevents of September 11th, it ‘will not end until every terrorist group of globalreach has been found, stopped and defeated’ (Bush, 2001b: 2). A ‘globalitarian’(Armitage, 2001: 29–30) social and political experience in which totalitarianism isglobalized and where there is apparently nowhere left to run or hide, the US ledWar on Terrorism presently encompasses states as diverse as Pakistan and Russia,Afghanistan, North Korea, Israel and Kenya. Undoubtedly, by enthusiasticallyproclaiming the War on Terrorism, Bush is essentially contending that the





promotion of global conflict, in conjunction with anti-terrorist forces andmeasures, is by far the best way of constructing a reunited and re-energizedAmerica under the sign of the let’s roll culture of responsibility. However, withinthe US, the War on Terrorism is more accurately characterized by what Deleuze(1995: 177–82) called the culture of control societies. Control societies are setapart from Foucault’s (1977) ‘disciplinary societies’ to some degree by their confi-dence in ICTs and an emergent ‘metaproduction’ or the buying of finishedproducts and activities, the selling and, crucially, the marketing of services(Deleuze, 1995: 181). From this perspective it is possible to argue that the Waron Terrorism as conducted within the US is a sort of hypermodern politicaleconomy of war as peace. The Department of Homeland Security, for instance,has recently instigated and marketed the ‘Ready campaign’. The campaign is a‘national multimedia public information program designed to build a citizenpreparedness movement by giving Americans the basic tools they need to betterprepare themselves and their families and encouraging them to “Be Ready”;Ready.gov has become one of the most visited sites in America’ (DHS, 2003: 1).My argument is that such campaigns not only embody the technologization andmilitarization of the home front of the War on Terrorism but also promote thefundamentally ineffectual idea of ‘being ready’, of imminent mobility, as a sourceof fascination and potential contentment both for Bush and for Americans gener-ally. In this sense, the Bush regime’s ‘being ready’ campaign is actually a meansfor displacing what Bauman (2002: 241) describes as the contemporary and indi-vidualized desire for mobility, for a change-of-place, onto the War on Terrorism.

For Bush, however, a strategic objective of the War on Terrorism remains theremoval of the social, political, economic and technical features of the doctrineof containment since, as noted, following the US’ symbolic overthrow onSeptember 11th, such a doctrine no longer has any meaning for the currentadministration. One important result of Bush’s election and opposition to thedoctrine of containment within the US is the decline of the influence oftraditional conservative opponents of radical change. For, since Bush came topower, the US has witnessed the rise of other neoconservatives like himself whoare for radical change such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and deputysecretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz (Drew, 2003: 20–2). As expected, theneoconservatives support the abolition of any and all barriers to the successfulprosecution of the War on Terrorism. Planning for additional backing fromordinary Americans for succeeding phases of the War is accordingly likely toentail the widespread institution of ‘the spirit of informationalism’, the ‘cultureof “creative destruction” accelerated to the speed of the optoelectronic circuitsthat process its signals’ (Castells, 2000: 215). Such preparations are fulfilled





through, for example, the Department of Homeland Security’s extensive deploy-ment of new technologies and tools at land, air and sea borders. For the Bushadministration, then, the War on Terrorism is in part a hypermodern mechanismfor releasing the US, alongside other states such as the United Kingdom, not justfrom the doctrine of containment but also from the modern spirit of industrial-ism. Hypermodernizing the spirit of industrialism thus necessitates the intro-duction of the ‘will to virtuality’ (Kroker and Weinstein, 1994: 163), the newlyfound longing of the let’s roll culture of responsibility to surrender itself to tech-nology. Hence, a key aim of the Bush regime’s War on Terrorism is to replacemodern technology and culture with the hypermodern technoculture of ‘recline’wherein contemporary US citizens succumb, with ‘fitful rebellions’, to the‘master values’ of technology, safety and the ‘petty conveniences’ (Kroker andWeinstein, 1994: 161).

My purpose in the first part of this penultimate section has been to shed lighton and to put into operation Jünger’s conceptual ideas with regard to the War onTerrorism within the US. It is of course important when explicating and utiliz-ing Jüngerian notions in a contemporary context to acknowledge the globalmagnitude and significance of the US national catastrophe of September 11th. Yetit is equally essential to detail the materialization of the War on Terrorism withinthe US not just in terms of Jünger’s ‘Total Mobilization’ and totalitarian rule butin terms of a provisional framework for understanding globalitarian rule. Isuggest that the key components of globalitarian rule can for the time being belisted as follows: hypermodern total mobilization; the calculated demolition ofthe doctrine and era of containment; the introduction of the let’s roll culture ofresponsibility together with the promotion of a purposeless ‘readiness’ orimminent mobility; neoconservatism; the spirit of informationalism; and the willto virtuality. The explanation presented here has examined the post-September11th War on Terrorism within the US through an analysis of Deleuzian controlsocieties.

The Neoconservative BodyWithin the context of the War on Terrorism, however, it is not merely the socialenvironment of the US that has altered but also conceptions of the body, which,for the Bush White House, are presently and primarily concerned with itsperspective on the bodies of soldiers, civilians and dictators. The Bush adminis-tration’s prototypical model of the neoconservative body is then an outcome ofthe American tragedy of September 11th and the subsequent War on Terrorism.The current US government’s outlook on the body is effectively and criticallysummarized by Bauman (2002: 105) who fittingly remarks that, in the War on





Terrorism, ‘it is solely the casualties among military personnel who truly countand are counted . . . The other casualties of the war are “collateral” ’.

Thus, in the eyes of the neoconservative body of President Bush (2001d: 1),‘the wreckage of New York City’ on September 11th bore all the ‘signs of thefirst battle of war’. For the Bush regime, therefore, September 11th marked thefirst phase of a wide-ranging US war on global terrorism and consequently, as inthe era of total war during World War II and as predicted by Jünger, the eleva-tion of the militarized body over the civilianized body. Wholly in step with theatmosphere of emergency that characterizes hypermodernity, the Bush adminis-tration rapidly abandoned any considered opinions concerning either thepervasive exploitation of ICTs or the likely consequences of such a developmentfor the civilianized body. As for Bush himself, making ‘progress’ in the War onTerrorism is gauged by and large by his frequent assertion that the US is winningit. But, for many Americans, it is even now something of an enigma as to what‘progress’ they are making in the War on Terrorism or what, precisely, it is theyare meant to have won, for instance, in the recent US led invasions of Afghanis-tan and Iraq. This riddle can of course be easily explained by the fact that theWar on Terrorism is inherently ‘unwinnable (not winnable conclusively) as longas the global space retains its “frontier-land” character’ (Bauman, 2002: 92). Yet,beyond the ruins and smoke of September 11th, one thing that is no longer amystery is that, for the present US government, the War on Terrorism necessi-tates the all-pervasive social deployment of ICTs and the incorporation of thecivilianized body into the militarized body. For these reasons, an importantobjective of the neoconservative body is the destruction of the conservative bodyof the age of containment, which wanted to hold on to the differences betweenthe civilianized body of post World War II accommodation and the militarizedbody of nuclear war. Simultaneously, however, the neoconservative body is alsoseeking, on occasion literally, the extermination of the dictatorial body of the eraof containment (Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, North Korea’s Kim Jong–II etc.) thatsought to abolish the distinctions between such civilianized and militarizedbodies. At present, then, the goal of the neoconservative body is to annihilateboth the conservative and the dictatorial bodies of the era of containment withthe intention of abandoning any conception of ‘progress’ within the War onTerrorism whilst integrating the widespread use of ICTs into the War itself.

Another post-September 11th objective of the Bush regime is the transform-ation of the civilianized body into a link within the circuits of the dark side ofCastells’ (2000) ‘network society’ that is the War on Terrorism. Consequently, asAmerica comes ‘to depend on the eyes and ears of alert citizens’ (Bush, 2002: 3),and by means of the informationalization and militarization of immaterial labor,





the civilianized body is progressively becoming incorporated into the militarizedbody. Levidow and Robins (1989: 1) convey this kind of integration perfectlywhen they suggest that:

in these ‘post-modern’ times we often behave as if we were cybernetic organisms – confusingthe mechanical and the organic, the inner and outer realms, simulation and reality, evenomnipotence and impotence . . . such cyborg worlds are structured by military paradigms ofpower, in particular through the military constitution of information technology.

Such military models of power and technology, first initiated in World War IIand subsequently intensified throughout the Cold War, are currently restructur-ing both the network society and the civilianized body within the US. WhatVirilio and Lotringer (1997: 26) describe as ‘civilian soldiers’ can thus be likenedto a newly incorporated cybernetic organism shaped by the integration of ICTsinto the War on Terrorism.

Furthermore, the neoconservative body put forward by the Bush adminis-tration as the body most appropriate to the era of globalitarian rule is addition-ally presented as the body best suited to the contemporary requirements ofAmerica, requirements that, as the hypermodern War on Terrorism develops andintensifies, increasingly mean the loss of civil liberties. A recent report by theAmerican Civil Liberties Union (ACLU, 2003), entitled ‘Bigger Monster, WeakerChains’, for example, explains how ‘improvements’ in surveillance technologies,such as biometric identification scanners and cell phone location systems, havemade it feasible for the Bush regime to produce an assortment of information onalmost any US citizen. In this way, then, the US Patriot Act of 2001, for instance,is not merely the continuation and marketing by other means of a kind of ColdWar McCarthyite paranoia but also a contribution to the burgeoning Americansurveillance society as it wears away time-honored safeguards against privacyabuses. Accordingly, the ACLU report concludes by calling for the overhaulingof existing and insufficient protections and the introduction of wide-rangingprivacy laws to deal with the new all-encompassing surveillance technologiesmade use of by the present US government in order to ‘win’ the War on Terror-ism. However, ordinary Americans are not just concerned about the US PatriotAct but also about projects such as ‘Operation TIPS’, a 2002 Justice Departmentproposal to rally and recruit US citizens into reporting ‘suspicious’ activity. Infact, Operation TIPS received such an antagonistic response that the Senateunequivocally barred it in the act launching the Department of HomelandSecurity. A Pentagon plan to examine US State and business-related databases for‘suspect’ activity, labeled ‘Total Information Awareness’, has also been stopped,for now (Economist, 2003: 49–51). For the Bush administration, therefore, theneoconservative body is a technique for discarding social practices based on





‘disciplinary man’, who ‘produced energy in discrete amounts’, and initiating life-styles founded on ‘control man’, who ‘undulates’ whilst ‘moving among acontinuous range of different orbits’ (Deleuze, 1995: 180). As Deleuze (1995: 180;original emphasis), and anticipating the age of the Internet and surveillance tech-nologies, expressed it: ‘Surfing has taken over from all the old sports’. The arche-typal neoconservative body championed by the Bush regime thus relates to thepolitical economy of the individualized bodies of civilian-soldiers in the epochof informationalized and technologized globalitarianism both at home andabroad. Hence, whilst Bush purportedly offers a political economy of theneoconservative body that fixes on the disaster of September 11th, what he in factpresents, under cover of the War on Terrorism, is the indiscriminate denial of civilliberties.

Moreover, the Bush White House is often remarkably unemotional withregard to the victims of the War on Terrorism worldwide whilst the War itself isoften presented by Bush and Rumsfeld in particular as an invigorating experienceinstituted on a model not unlike the old Soviet five year plan. As a result, as notedabove, while those bodies injured in the hypermodern War on Terrorism provokeofficial US compassion, they normally only do so if the dead and wounded areUS military personnel. Meanwhile, the US predilection for ‘being ready’ foressentially unproductive action on the home front of the War on Terrorismcontinues to seek to draw on the sensation of imminent mobility as a basis forcaptivation and prospective happiness. Yet, as Bauman (2002: 103) explains, theBush administration’s appreciation of the War on Terrorism as a stimulatingencounter presently culminates in the US military’s vision not of the civilian-soldier but of the cyborg-soldier. For the Bush regime, then, the War on Terror-ism offers a kind of political satisfaction since it allows the US government toincrease the ‘ratio of technical equipment to human power’ whilst decreasing the‘portion of the skills once lodged in soldiers’ memories and trained habits’(Bauman, 2002: 103). But, arguably, for the cyborg-soldier, the ‘new tactics ofstriking and killing at a distance, coupled with the shift of the task of target selec-tion on to inhuman (unfeeling and morally blind) parts of the war machine’(Bauman, 2002: 103), bring little gratification. This is because such tactics notonly intensify the cyborg-soldier’s level of socio-military separation but alsopurge any ongoing preparations for the destruction of people and property of all‘ethical evaluation and moral inhibitions’ (Bauman, 2002: 103).

My reading and use of Jünger’s way of thinking with regard to the totallymobilized body prepared the foundations for a consideration in the second partof this section of the neoconservative body in the US. Here, the neoconservativeview of the body was unequivocally censured because, when combined as it is





with an almost Jüngerian conception of the War on Terrorism and globalitarianrule, it is exclusively the victims among the military who actually matter. Thusthe neoconservative body is devoted to the ascendancy of the militarized bodyover the civilianized body. Furthermore, as I have attempted to demonstrate, theneoconservative body is committed to the integration of the civilianized bodywith the militarized body. My understanding and deployment of a Jüngerianstance, for example on the omnipresent social exploitation of ICTs within thecontext of the US’ War on Terrorism, is then a hypermodern critique of theneoconservative body. In this respect it is critical to emphasize the differencesbetween Jünger’s conception of the totally mobilized body and my own under-standing of the neoconservative body. For, unlike the totally mobilized body,which was involved with the destruction of the partially mobilized body and themonarchical body, the neoconservative body is preoccupied with the obliterationof the conservative and the dictatorial bodies of the age of containment and withthe development of cybernetic organisms and civilian-soldiers. Additionally,whilst the bodies of the Foucauldian disciplinary society were apprehensiveabout perceptible corporeal surveillance and the material loss of civil liberties, thebodies of the Deleuzian control society are apt to be more concerned with virtu-alized, almost disembodied, technological surveillance and the metaproduction ofinformation on the population at large. However, there is little sense in inquir-ing, for instance, whether the conscript-soldier of the disciplinary society wasmore alienated than the cyborg-soldier of the control society since both werecleansed of and bound to ethical judgments and moral inhibitions but in differentways.

The core of my socio-political position regarding Jünger’s conception of totalmobilization and the totally mobilized body is then that critical social theoristscan discover a great deal about totalitarian rule and its implications for the bodythrough a close reading of ‘Total Mobilization’. For me, this has entailed a socialcritique of those hypermodernized Jüngerian ideas that I associate with the Waron Terrorism and the neoconservative body, globalitarian rule and hypermoderntotal mobilization.

Conclusion

In closing, I want to re-emphasize that Jünger’s socio-political prophecy in ‘TotalMobilization’ is an argument in support of totalitarian rule that can be describedas a feature of a tyrannical one-party state which controls every area of life. I alsowant to underline that this article has not only presented a critique of Jünger’splea for the introduction of totalitarian rule but also of the Bush administration’s


12 Armitage (jr/d) 15/1/04 1:46 pm 9



demand for the launch of globalitarian rule on the pretext of fighting the War onTerrorism. For these reasons I shall finally turn to Paul Virilio’s call for whatmight be labeled anti-globalitarian rule and to a brief outline of my own concep-tion of egalitarian rule. Virilio’s work is significant for any debate over egalitarianrule not only because he argues that globalitarianism is of key socio-politicalimportance in the present period but also because he contends that globalitari-anism is what surpasses totalitarianism. Thus, as the following comment ofVirilio’s (Armitage, 2001: 29) demonstrates, whilst totalitarianism was a centralissue throughout the twentieth century:

now, through the single market, through globalization, through the convergence of timetowards a single time, a world time, a time which comes to dominate local time, and the stuffof history, what emerges, through cyberspace, through the big telecommunications conglom-erates, is a new totalitarianism, a totalitarianism of totalitarianism, and this is what I call glob-alitarianism. It is the totalitarianism of all totalities . . . Globalitarianism is social cybernetics.And that’s something infinitely dangerous, more dangerous even, perhaps, than the Nazi orcommunist brands of totalitarianism.

The question of globalitarian rule is therefore of vital concern in the twenty firstcentury because it transcends totalitarian rule. Yet surely it is not overly opti-mistic to imagine that many of those presently subject to the experience oftwenty-first century globalitarian rule will soon come to resist the marketisationand globalization of everything, the relentless acceleration and integration ofICTs and the continued rise of the telecommunications conglomerates? The mainimplication of Virilio’s remarks with regard to this new totalitarianism, to thistotalitarianism of totalitarianism, to this globalitarian rule, is that it is far tooimportant a topic to be left to the rulers of the totalitarianism of all totalities andthe merchants of social cybernetics. An important task for those conscientiousobjectors who refuse to serve in the armed forces of globalitarian rule is then towelcome among them any additional dissenters who advocate the varied idealsof egalitarian rule and who delight in democracy. Through a keen attentivenessto the eclipse of democracy by globalitarian rule, the merits of conscientiousobjectors and defenders of egalitarian rule are that they develop and disseminatea spirit of social equality that is currently under threat.

Neither Jünger’s opinions on the totally mobilized body nor the Bushadministration’s judgments on the neoconservative body can be supported bycritical social and political theorists, because whilst the totally mobilized body isa constituent of totalitarian rule, the neoconservative body is an element of glob-alitarian rule. Critical social and political theorists as a result require an analysisof the neoegalitarian body which will appreciate the corporeality of the humanbody and the obligation to re-familiarize ourselves both with our own


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civilianized bodies and those of others in contemporary society. The neoegali-tarian body is then a body that is oriented not to the militarized but to the civil-ianized condition. War, as Jünger understood, is an intoxication beyond allintoxication, an unleashing that breaks all bonds, and for these reasons it disori-ents the civilianized body’s points of reference. The fundamental difficulty with,for example, the War on Terrorism, with hypermodern total mobilization withinthe US, is that it effectively denies civilianization in favor of militarization. Ibelieve that reappropriating the civilianized body is not just a question of politicsbut also a question of sociology, of connecting with others and to the socialworld.

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John Armitage is Principal Lecturer in Politics and Media Studies, Northumbria University, UK. Heis the editor of Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond (Sage, 2000) and theauthor of several articles on cultural theory, technology and politics.





On Ernst Jünger’s ‘Total Mobilization’- A Re-evaluation in the Era of the War on Terrorism...

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